All things considered, it wouldn’t make much difference. I might just as well work with my eyes closed anyway.
Felix dived a few feet deeper. He tried to find the bottom again as the submerged riverbank sloped down. The farther out he moved the more insistent the surging current force became. Any moment, an uprooted tree weighing tons could wash down the river and smash right into him. As he whipped around in the turbulent flow near the end of the anchoring rope, he might be impaled on a steel rebar projecting from a broken concrete abutment of the now-damaged upper tourist walkway. There were hidden reefs and rocks, which might knock him unconscious to drown. Felix decided he’d better let some gas out of his buoyancy compensator to make himself heavy and gain more traction.
Submerged in brownish darkness, he touched the pebbled bottom with his flippered feet, standing in a low crouch sideways to the current to minimize his water resistance. The pressure in his ears told him he wasn’t dangerously deep. The men tried to steady him by steadying their parts of the rope — they certainly couldn’t see him from even a few yards away, and could only guess at what he was trying to do from minute to minute. The anchor rope, the lifeline, was his sole connection to the team.
Felix kept his river-crossing stick upstream of him, slanted down into the flow as he leaned into it. The stick helped break the current, while the pressure of the current lodged the stick against the bottom and levered its high end down on his chest. This gave him firmer footing and added stability as he inched along. Felix began to search the bottom blindly, systematically, by touch alone. Sometimes he used the stick instead to cast about in order to give himself greater reach. He became afraid of losing all sense of direction, and wandering unknowingly right over the edge of the falls.
Finally he found what he was looking for before it found and pierced or fractured him. A subtle back swirl in the feel of the current just downstream was his guide. He’d located the remnants of one of the walkway support piers. To work, Felix now required both hands. He collapsed his crossing stick and wrapped its lanyard tighter around his wrist so he wouldn’t lose it. The intense flow of the river still dragged at him constantly, and its hiss and rumble were relentless in his ears. No sunlight penetrated from the tumultuous surface above.
Felix took a free end of the coil of rope draped over his torso and deftly secured it to the bent steel bars that jutted from the concrete of the pier. Using this new length of rope as his safety anchor now, he secured the end of the first rope to the pier, then tugged a signal, which told the team that the far end of their rope was secure, and he was ready to advance another hundred yards. Keeping himself on a short leash for the moment, he let more gas into his buoyancy compensator.
Felix popped his head above the surface; he had to squint in the sudden brightness. He could barely make out the cluster of boulders that was his next objective. The noise of the falls was much louder with his ears out of the water. He kicked with his swim fins to try to lift his head high — the waves that were created as the river converged on the falls, and split into channels between all the islands and rocks, made it hard to see far.
Small splashes raised up all around him. Felix ducked below and heard the impact of the bullets against the surface. Those German MP-5s weren’t accurate for long-range sniping, but one lucky hit from a spray of rounds would still have high velocity, enough to kill any man it struck. Felix knew his team had to reach that cluster of boulders soon, and leave a man behind there temporarily in order to give the rest of them covering fire.
Felix was growing tired. His team had reached a flat little island on the very edge of the falls. It was covered in thick green underbrush, and he used this for concealment as he crawled forward. His men followed.
For a moment Felix paused to rest and gave hand signals for his team to do the same. Here, the noise of the falls was overwhelming. Speech was out of the question.
Felix lay on his back, supporting his Draeger with his arms, and glanced up at the sky. Streaks and fluffs of white cloud drifted peacefully far above. Butterflies swarmed, in amazing numbers, immune to any sense of danger; some were vivid turquoise with wingspans of four inches. He sighed and rolled over onto his elbows and knees, fighting the weight of his Draeger, then crept to the side of the island for a broad field of view in order to judge the enemy’s progress. The Germans had a head start and a clearer plan, but he hoped their pace would be slowed by the weight of the bomb.
Felix felt his way gingerly through the underbrush. Suddenly he felt nothing in front of him at all. He crawled forward inch by inch, very carefully, and peeked between the leafy ferns and branches.
He was on the verge of a gaping precipice two miles across. Curving wide around both sides of him, literally hundreds of waterfalls poured down. Brown water churned into white as he watched. Droplets turned into foam that turned into spray. Thick sheets of water ran over the edge in unimaginable quantities, as if the supply would last for all eternity. The waterfalls in most places fell in steps, where smaller and lower plateaus jutted out from the face of the main escarpment. Everywhere water plummeted and smashed; in some spots the drop went straight to the bottom, thirty stories below. When islands on the edge were big enough to block the flow from wide patches, the entire cliff face beneath was covered in unbroken greenery. Mist like plumes of smoke rose up from where water ceaselessly impacted at the boiling base of the cliffs. Down there the river recovered itself and rushed on, in fast-flowing white-water rapids that disappeared around a broad bend to the west. Birds darted high and low, safe from the power of the falls, feeding on insects that flew through the swirling clouds of foggy vapor. Updrafts drenched Felix’s face. A rich and vivid rainbow framed the entire awesome, magnificent scene.
Felix felt as if the waterfall complex and rainbow were reaching to wrap around and embrace — or crush — him bodily. He began to suffer vertigo, gazing down into this all-encompassing deluge powered by unforgiving, unrelenting gravity. He asked himself if the vista reminded him more of heaven or hell. He tried to imagine what it would be like here in the first few seconds and minutes after a nuclear weapon went off.
Then bullets tore through the bushes above his head, and Felix remembered he and his team had a job to do.
Felix and his men struggled through always-tugging water, saved from doom only by their anchored climbing ropes. They crawled over islets and rocks under enemy fire. The alternate up and down, the going in and out of the river — using Draegers one moment and shooting their MP-5s the next — became increasingly taxing both physically and mentally. The SEALs were getting closer to the Germans, which meant they were closer to the bomb. But the Germans were getting closer to the Devil’s Throat with the bomb, and the return fire from their submachine guns was growing progressively more accurate. At least the German machine cannon wasn’t shooting their way, not yet. It must be busy arguing with my light-machine-gun crew.
Then Felix felt total despair. He watched as kampfschwimmer on a fragment of walkway near the Devil’s Throat began to lower the bomb, at the end of a rope, straight down into the vortex. He ordered his men to try to stop them with sustained fire.
The SEALs’ silenced weapons coughed and sputtered, burning through magazine after magazine. Kampfschwimmer on or near the walkway returned the fire just as viciously. Both sides began to take losses.
Felix saw one kampfschwimmer pitch headfirst off the walkway, then snatch up short on a rope that had secured him to a fragment of the railing. Right at the edge of the Devil’s Throat, his body twirled like a rubber doll in the torrent. More bullets flew in both directions.